


deep cut

by rudimentaryflair



Series: Drabble Jar [2]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Don't copy to another site, Gen, Light Angst, me @ zoro and kuina's relationship: it's free real estate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-03
Updated: 2020-05-03
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23976058
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rudimentaryflair/pseuds/rudimentaryflair
Summary: “You’re too puny,” she says. What he hears is,You will grow.
Relationships: Kuina & Roronoa Zoro
Series: Drabble Jar [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1696225
Comments: 10
Kudos: 54





	deep cut

**Author's Note:**

> **deep cut**  
>  (n.) an emotion you haven't felt in years that you might have forgotten about completely if your emotional playlist hadn't been left on shuffle—a feeling whose opening riff tugs on all your other neurons like a dog on a leash waiting for you to open the door.

He arrives at the dojo so sure of himself, drunk and drowning in confidence, sobering only under the crisp wood of Kuina’s bokken. She knocks him off his feet, off his throne, knocks him to the ground and then lower than that. Zoro’s first lesson ends with him sprawled in his own sour hubris. 

Kuina teaches him many things. She teaches him defeat. She teaches him resolve. She teaches him how to brawl, how to banter, how to be alright after a fight and how to be better for someone else. She teaches him how to get back up, a single hand reaching out after every loss before kicking him right back into the dirt. 

“You’re too puny,” she says. What he hears is, _You will grow._

He learns fragility when she snaps her neck on the stairs of the dojo. Coldness, like her new home in the ground. He learns betrayal and something scalding and acrid ― not despair, no, this feeling clings to his teeth like foil, like barbed wire around his bones. He learns what it means to be lost, to be running in circles, never visiting the same place twice and still feeling his footsteps overlap. He holds his grief tight, grips it’s burning hand with white knuckles and learns what it means to chase after a dead dream.

 _You will never lose,_ it says. _I will never lose,_ he agrees. And he doesn’t, until he does, until he is cut in half like the wreck of a ship he is standing on. _I will never lose,_ he cries, sword pointed at the heavens, and he loses to candles and shadows, to zombies and men made of light.

The universe spits in his face. _Weak,_ it snarls. _Lost. Always off guard, never paying attention. Too many mistakes, too many losses. Death by a thousand cuts._

His grief disapproves. It nags at him, guts him when the watches are long and the nights drag on and on. Follows him across the world.

“You carry something,” Mihawk tells him.

“A dream,” Zoro replies.

“It’s heavy.”

“Dreams are heavy.”

“No,” Mihawk says, “burdens are heavy.” _You will never rise like this,_ is what Zoro hears. 

The universe spits in his face and he spits back. _How dare you say those things to me,_ he snarls, _how dare you be so arrogant. I bent and I came out stronger, I bled and I came out better, they brought me down and I made spears of my bones, found iron and steel in my blood, on my broken legs I stood; I sat by death on an empty bench and we parted as friends. I did not lose, I stumbled._

Behind the stone walls of the castle, he relearns. He relearns defeat, relearns resolve, relearns how to be alright after a fight. Savors the burn of bowing his head low, low, of begging to be taught. In some ways, he is still a shrimp of a kid, staring down the end of a bokken. A part of him used to be ashamed of that. That part of him is his first kill in the New World. 

There is a girl who’s small hand he holds. She had passed a white torch to him years ago in her sleep, in the sorghum fields behind the dojo. This is what he remembers when he is beaten, when he is bloody and dizzy, when his breath scrapes painfully in his lungs.

His most important lesson: he learns how to let go.

**Author's Note:**

> @ Oda where is the detailed Kuina&Zoro backstory we deserve. Where is it.
> 
> EDIT: Yes, I switched two of the paragraphs. It was bothering me. 
> 
> I'm rudimentaryflair on Tumblr!


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